Jim Squires, Instagram's director/market operations recently sat down with Business Insider to discuss the state of the business and we asked him whether the 200 million user statistic merely represented downloads or current active users. The distinction is important because active users are more meaningful than people who download an app and then delete it.

Squires said the 200 million were MAUs, and that he expected that number to grow dramatically. "Because Instagram is imagery-oriented, it's universal ... we're very focused on growth and plan to grow it to 1 billion users. That's what we're doing." Instagram isn't bound by language — a cool picture from Thailand can go as viral as one from Boise, Idaho; but a Facebook post in English might grind to a halt where people speak Thai.

He noted that two-thirds of Instagram's users are outside the U.S., and that the app was seeing "heavy" growth internationally.